§ Nice Art: The Black Hammer Annual came out last week, and Dean Ormston’s art on the regular series is pretty amazing, but this bit by Mtt Kindt is nice too. Other stories in the ish by Dustin Nguyen, Emi Lenox, Nate Powell and Ray Fawkes, with colors by Dave

§ BTW the reason sI run “nice Art” at the top of K’n’B is so that all the beed that pick up from it will have a nice graphic at the top – as well as to promote nice art. If you have a submission for nice art email me at comicsbeat at gmail.com.

§ Sean Spicer made a memorable debut as United States Press Secretary to the Trump administration Saturday by coming out blazing insistiing that several easily disprovable things were in fact true. However, I guess we can’t be too hard on him since he might be one of us, as this tweet from 2013 shows. Katsucno is a big anime show held in the Baltimore/Washington DC metro area. Spicer’s past is in the naval reserve, a congressional aid and PR; who he likes to cosplay as is unknown at this time.

§ Esquire’s list of 80 Books Every Person Should Read contains ONE graphic novel, but I won’t tell you what so you will have to go through whole list and once again tell yourself you MUST read As I Lay Dying.

The first time I read the series, it struck me that Spider’s first issue transformation from wild haired, bushy bearded hermit to utterly hairless and sporting bizarre sunglasses more or less took him from Alan Moore to Grant Morrison, which is probably accidental. The preference for living in relative isolation and grudging return to the city is all self parody on Ellis’ part, however. In 2015, Ellis took to Medium to offer up a contemplation of how geography informs his worldview that harkens back to Transmetropolitan’s debut. He parallels the shifting sands he’s observed living on the coast his whole life with his changing fortunes as a freelancer, putting Spider firmly in an ebb tide when we first meet him. Ellis’ thoughts on how this relates to aging puts him more or less in line with what he conceived of for Spider twenty years ago.

Author Julia Alekseyeva’s great-grandmother Lola lived to be 100 years old, long enough to see the birth, and eventual collapse, of the USSR. In 1992, she and her family — including young Julia — moved from Kiev to Chicago. Unbeknownst to her family, Lola began to write her memoirs, recording the stories of her life as a Jew in the Soviet Union, filled with vivid details and enlivened by a strong, independent spirit. Upon Lola’s death, Julia discovered her great-grandmother’s memoirs, and has now transformed them into her debut graphic novel, Soviet Daughter.

Don’t worry, most of the books in the Next Persepolis Derby are pretty good!

§ The first reviews on Wilson, the adaptation of the Daniel Clowes graphic novel are in, following its Sundance debut, and they are mixed. Variety:

If suburb-bashing sounds a little…I don’t know, 1985 to you, then welcome to Wilson’s world. He’s not dim, but he’s stuck in a soggy bubble of fraying boomer insights: technology is bad, hanging out is good, corporate homogenization is bad, saying whatever comes into your head with no filter is good. The hook of Wilson’s personality is that he’s an oddball-outsider who cuts through the bull. In truth, though, he sounds like an aging cranky white male whose arbitrary complaints boil down to the world no longer being the one that he grew up in. (If this were 100 years ago, he’s be griping about cars and telephones.) All of which is to say that in “Wilson,” Daniel Clowes’ voice, which was once acerbically hip, sounds dated.

The universe of graphic artist and screenwriter Daniel Clowes, with its curmudgeons, misfits, ranting neurotics and dyspeptic visionaries, is a tricky place to inhabit. Terry Zwigoff nailed it best with the cool detachment of Ghost World but then missed the mark almost completely with Art School Confidential, which veered into self-conscious misanthropy and snide skewering of easy targets. Director Craig Johnson, following up on his dark but disarming The Skeleton Twins, gets only a fraction closer in the patchy Wilson, which boasts some funny vignettes but fails in the crucial test of making us care much about the title character.

Heidi MacDonald is the founder and editor in chief of The Beat. In the past, she worked for Disney, DC Comics, Fox and Publishers Weekly. She can be heard regularly on the More To Come Podcast. She likes coffee, cats and noble struggle.

I’m not yet done my top comics list. I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks with a new job and Birthday celebrations. I do plan to have it out before the end of the month. These other “top lists” are good to see though, just to see if I missed a list out there somewhere.